Bonnie Erbe: Real men on board effort of gender equality

The final stage of feminism is something I call “masculism.” If women are ever to reach true parity, men must be on board.

Male attitudes, behavior and relationships — and perceptions about them — were in focus this week at a symposium on men, peace and security organized by the U.S. Institute of Peace. The independent, federally funded national security institute shared research indicating that men are not innately much more prone to violence than women — a trailblazing finding that defies stereotypes.

Further, men’s engagement in violent conflict is a form of male victimization, researchers said, much as male chauvinism victimizes females.

The male hormone testosterone can produce a propensity toward aggression, according to “The Other Side of Gender: Men As Critical Agents of Change,” a new research paper distributed at the symposium. But aggression is not hard-wired to violent behavior. Such behavior, the paper contends, “is the result of a more complicated interplay among biology and social context. Violence is ultimately learned and encouraged in the social environment — which suggests that it can be unlearned.”

Most Americans would say men are more violent than women. More men go to prison for violent crimes, more men sign up to go to the front lines of combat zones, more men than women are the aggressors in sexual assault, etc. Imagine if this behavior could be unlearned: It would diminish conflicts and violence, making room for peace. Another factor that leads men to violence is economic frustration. The paper’s authors write that economic independence and providing for one’s family “can be an integral part of masculine identity. Men who are unemployed, lacking in both income and social recognition, are more prone to be violent and participate in armed conflicts.” Large-scale unemployment can “create a large pool of idle young men with few prospects and little to lose.”

I reported a story in Cairo in the 1990s on efforts to give Egyptian women access to contraception and the ability to plan their families. At a clinic, I was surprised to see women sitting with their husbands, waiting to see a doctor. That society did not allow women access to birth control without their husbands’ consent — a constraint in many developing countries. But that’s when I first realized that parity for women on a global scale depended on the active participation of men in women’s advancement.

It’s true here in the United States, too. If we want to end domestic violence, we must break the cycle of violence that society perpetrates on men. In places such as Democratic Republic of the Congo, little boys are conscripted as slave soldiers to fight for guerrilla armies. In the United States, boys are indoctrinated into violence by playing graphic, brutal video games that virtually expose them to some horrors of war. And we wonder why domestic violence is rampant. The next stage of feminism is about engaging men. Once men see the way society devalues them by sacrificing them in a culture of violence, they see the light. Once they appreciate the gift of engaging in family life, they start to see women as partners rather than as subjects. Then we all flourish.